The night in 1970 that became Goldie Hawn’s biggest career regret: “I never got dressed up”
Anyone who has seen Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day will probably have thought at some point, ‘Hmm, Emily Blunt may well get an Oscar for this’, and well she might, but Spielberg was in fact able to call upon an Oscar-winning actor for his very first film, in the shape of Goldie Hawn.
More than 50 years old now, The Sugarland Express was the legendary director’s theatrical debut, back in 1974, and it says something about how the young Spielberg was viewed in Hollywood that he was able to land Hawn to play the role of a mother, who, together with her husband, takes a policeman hostage to prevent their child from being put in a foster home.
Because Hawn had won a ‘Best Supporting Actress’ Oscar for her own debut movie, the 1969 comedy Cactus Flower opposite Walter Matthau, although, perhaps surprisingly, it didn’t immediately lead to the kind of global fame and fortune she would experience later in her career.
Hawn, in fact, didn’t even attend the 1970 Oscar ceremony at which she would have collected the golden statuette, as she told ITV’s Loose Women, “I never got dressed up; I never got to pick up the award. I regret it. It’s something that I look back on now and think, ‘It would have been so great to be able to have done that’.”
The reason she didn’t go was fairly simple: she didn’t believe she had any chance of winning whatsoever, and so stayed at home. She added, “I forgot it was on television that night. Then I woke up to a phone call at like four in the morning, and it was a man’s voice, and he said, ‘Hey, congratulations, you got it, you got the Academy Award for ‘Best Supporting Actress‘.”
Hawn ended up crying after getting the news, and the experience was so painful that she wouldn’t even watch footage of the award being announced until she was a guest on Jimmy Kimmel’s show in 2023, discovering that she would have had the award handed to her by the great Fred Astaire.
After the Oscar win, Hawn went back to appearing on TV shows, mostly doing comedy sketches, and made a couple more movies, neither of which was very successful, before she was cast in Spielberg’s first outing. Although it made a reasonable profit and the critics were impressed, The Sugarland Express wasn’t the launchpad for Hawn she might have hoped for. That came six years later with 1980’s Private Benjamin, the comedy that brought in $70million at the box office against a budget of just $9m and that made her a star.
This movie is about a wealthy young woman whose husband dies on their wedding night, leaving her bereft, directionless, and ultimately deciding to join the US army, which led to Hawn being nominated for an Oscar yet again, and she also collected a Golden Globe nomination for the role. Throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, she moved steadily into the A-list category, starting a long relationship with fellow movie star Kurt Russell and appearing in hits like Bird on a Wire, Death Becomes Her and First Wives Club.
Most recently, she has appeared in Netflix’s festive franchise The Christmas Chronicles alongside Russell as Santa, but the last of those was in 2020, and she hasn’t made a movie since.
